[Sosfbay-discuss] Richard Pombo

[alexcathy at aol.com]

See below a New York Times editorial about Wes Rolley's dear great 
Congressman, Richard Pombo.
Please note that The Honorable Representative Pombo comes from a 
gerrymandered district that
wanders all over the place in search of a Republican "conservative" 
majority.


Alex Walker


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Published by the New York Times, October 30, 2005

EDITORIAL: POMBO TIME


Richard Pombo has had a hard time keeping himself out of the news 
lately. In late September, a watchdog group called Citizens for 
Responsibility and Ethics in Washington named Mr. Pombo, a seven-term 
House member from California, one of the 13 most corrupt politicians in 
Congress. Three weeks later the Center for Public Integrity accused him 
of taking junkets paid for by the International Foundation for the 
Conservation of Natural Resources - the kind of organization, heavy 
with corporate donors, in which the word "conservation" is a wink to 
the wise. And last week the League of Conservation Voters accused him 
of selling out to a long list of corporate interests.

But what has really put Mr. Pombo on everyone's radar is the steady 
stream of environmentally destructive legislation flowing from the 
House Resources Committee, which he runs. The legislation would 
undermine environmental safeguards and raise broad new threats to 
endangered species and public lands.

Mr. Pombo, of course, makes no apologies. First elected in 1992 - he 
was a first-term city councilman in Tracy, Calif., at the time - he is 
philosophically an outspoken product of the extreme property rights 
movement. He once liked to claim, falsely as it turned out, that his 
rights had been trampled by environmentalists and by the provisions of 
the Endangered Species Act.

He came to Congress as a result of redistricting. With luck he will 
leave the same way. The 11th District, once largely agricultural, has 
been overwhelmed by development; and while the East Bay and Central 
Valley are still nominally Republican, it is far from certain that they 
will continue to support a man of Mr. Pombo's radical turn of mind.

In 2003, thanks to the support of the hard-nosed Republican leader Tom 
DeLay, he became, at age 42, the Resources Committee chairman and thus 
the bottleneck through which most legislation involving energy and the 
environment must pass. Mr. Pombo has more than lived up to Mr. DeLay's 
expectations, pure in ideology, tough in legislative combat.

In September, he engineered floor approval of a bill that would 
completely undermine the Endangered Species Act, which is something he 
has wanted to do since arriving in Washington. And last week, in a tour 
de force, he engineered committee approval of a budget bill that is 
ostensibly meant to raise federal revenues but in fact represents a 
major assault on the public lands.

In its original form Mr. Pombo's bill called for the sale of 15 
national parks. He withdrew that idea - a stunt, he says - as well as 
the notion of selling mineral rights within the parks. He now proposes 
allowing mining companies to buy lands on which they have staked 
claims. This practice, known as "patenting," was banned in 1995, and 
under present rules companies can only lease federal land.

Mr. Pombo says his proposal will help the federal budget because 
companies will have to pay $1,000 an acre to buy the land. But the 
provision is so vaguely drawn - companies, for instance, will not have 
to show that the land contains valuable minerals - that it could 
potentially expose hundreds of millions of acres, including the 
national forests, to development. This has nothing to do with mining, 
and everything to do with stealing land that is owned by the American 
public.

Mr. Pombo's bill would also authorize drilling in coastal areas that 
have been off limits for decades and sell leases in the Arctic National 
Wildlife Refuge. But asking the oil companies themselves for money is, 
of course, unthinkable - Mr. Pombo would freeze the fees these 
companies pay to operate on public land, even as they report huge 
profits.

This is, in short, a sleazy piece of work, written by a man who appears 
to be able to conceive of property rights as something that only a 
private individual or a corporation can have; a man who betrays no 
awareness that the American public has a shared right in the refuge and 
the national parks and the millions of acres he wants to sell to 
developers.

Mr. Pombo's only idea, and it is a terrible one, is to treat this 
nation the way he treats his Congressional district, as if it were ripe 
for exploitation.

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